SPAN103

Love and Revolution

Love is a central virtue of human kind that frames some of the most significant relationships and roles we will experience in our lifetime, particularly during times of change.  From guerrilla movements and political upheaval to intimate acts of resistance and desire, we will examine how love in its various enactments—patriotic, romantic, familial, erotic—serves as metaphor and material force in accounts of revolution in Latin American literary and cultural production of the 20^th and 21^st centuries.

Beginning with Pedro Páramo (1955), Juan Rulfo’s haunting representation of (post)revolutionary Mexico and ending with Cantoras, Caro de Robertis’s unapologetic imagining of five women’s fight for freedom in Uruguay’s military dictatorship, RMST 280 traverses countries (Mexico, Cuba, Nicaragua, Colombia, Argentina, Uruguay), rebel movements, and genres to evaluate how some of the most influential voices and works-in-translation from both fiction and non-fiction traditions frame the powerful interplay between love and revolution in a Latin American context: Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s Cuban campaign diary, Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War and Gioconda Belli’s autobiographical memoir on love and revolution in Nicaragua, The Country Under My Skin, as well as Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and Manuel Puig’s seductive exploration of intimacy and resistance from within the prison cell in The Kiss of the Spider Woman, among segments from other representative texts.  We will also consider the intersections of the works studied with music, film and documentary, and artistic production, as well as other themes that shape perceptions of love during times of revolution.

Accessibility—in terms of topics addressed and types of works studied, affordability and easy access to materials, and student interests and levels—is a major priority for the instructor.

Language of instruction: English

Instructor: Dr. Brianne Orr-Álvarez

Prerequisites: No prerequisites

Don Quixote and Errant Subjects in a Global Context

Plate I of Gustave Doré's illustrations to Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote. From Chapter I.

Discover Cervantes’s masterpiece, Don Quixote (1605), through close readings covering topics that range from gender, race, translation, economic crises, to religious turmoil and social inequality. By applying an interdisciplinary approach, Cervantes’s works will be discussed in relation to the artistic and historical context of renaissance and baroque Spain, drawing upon the visual arts, films, music, dance, opera, historical texts and education manuals, while deconstructing the different kinds of fiction — pastoral, picaresque, sentimental Moorish novella, Italian novella, and romances of chivalry — that inhabit this novel.

Special emphasis will be placed on examining the representation of “others,” within the context of the expulsion of Jewish and Moorish minorities. The course will consider “errant” subjects in its two dimensions: as those straying from the accepted course, unacceptable actions; and traveling in search of adventure, a wandering journey.

Attesting to his global reach, Cervantes has been influential to thinkers from Lukács to Foucault to Bakhtin to Girard to the Frankfurt School, and to writers from Nabokov to Borges to Flaubert to García Márquez and beyond. His works have served as inspiration for painters (Goya, Doré, Dalí, Picasso), musicians (Purcell, Telemann, Massenet, Strauss, Falla), cineastes (Pabst, Welles, Gutiérrez Aragón), and critics (Unamuno, Ortega y Gasset, Mann, Marthe Robert). As regards Don Quixote, no other book, with the exception of the Bible, has been translated to more languages, or undergone more editions and reprints. A herald of modernity, Miguel de Cervantes’s works casts a vast influence on Hispanic and World literature as a whole

Required texts:

• [Optional] Spanish Version: Miguel de Cervantes, El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha. Ed. Tom Lathrop. Newark: Juan de la Cuesta, 2005. Legacy Edition. (ISBN- 978-158977-100-0)
• González Echevarría, Roberto, ed. Cervantes’ Don Quixote: A Casebook. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
• Elliott, John Huxtable. Imperial Spain, 1469-1716. New York: Penguin, 2002.
• Lathrop, Tom. Don Quijote Dictionary. Cervantes & Co, Juan de la Cuesta, 2005.

Prerequisites: No prerequisites

Language of instruction: English

[Cross-listed with FREN 512B]

Cultural Mobilities in Theory and Practice

Cultural mobility can be defined as mobilities relayed in and of cultural products, events, and phenomena. The concept can be viewed as part of a recent, influential critical movement to foreground mobility in social sciences and in the humanities and arts. According to Tim Cresswell (On the Move, 2006: 2-3), mobility is the effect of movement, meaning, and power. John Urry underscores the necessity to analyze assemblages or interconnections of five interdependent mobilities in social life: the corporeal travel of people; the physical movement of objects; imaginative travel through perusing the media; virtual travel through, for instance, Zoom meetings; and communicative travel using, for example, social media (Mobilities, 2006: 47-8). The mobilities paradigm has been used to explain significant socio-cultural phenomena, ranging from social inequality to global climate change, all of which are related to physical movements in crucial ways.

This course introduces the research field of cultural mobilities in relation to case studies focused on several mobile subjects—namely, merchants, explorers, tourists, colonizers, political pilgrims, migrants, and refugees—within Italian, French, and Chinese contexts. The course is divided into two units. In the first unit, students learn critical frames and tools from social scientific and humanistic inquiries into mobilities. In the second unit, students are encouraged to use these theoretical insights to approach major intercultural events (e.g., the Age of Discovery, the Grand Tour, and migrations) as they are articulated in narratives of diverse types (e.g., novels, journalism, diaries, and films). In particular, we consider authorial intent, knowledge creation, cultural technologies, affects, meaning-meaning, and power dynamics that these narratives help articulate. Through this exercise, toward the end of the semester, we assess how we may contribute to further theorizing cultural mobility analysis

Language of instruction : English

Identity, Ideology and Power

Instructor: Marie-Eve Bouchard
Language of instruction: French

This graduate seminar will delve into three critical themes in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology: ideology, identity, and power. Its broad objective is to examine how language ideologies are involved in the construction of power structure and social identities. Focusing largely on key articles, this course engages with debates and methods for analysing linguistic evidence pertaining to symbolic power, cultural contact and language shift, migration and mobility, authenticity and identity, resistance, and digital communication. Throughout this seminar, we will explore the social, economic and political consequences of different identification strategies by discussing how people’s beliefs about language reinforce or contest normative power structures and social. All discussions and work submitted in this course will be in French. The class is designed for three main audiences: 1) graduate students in French linguistics, 2) graduate students in the French literature interested in language use, and 3) advanced undergraduate students who have taken sociolinguistics courses at FHIS. All discussions and work submitted in this course will be in French.

Recommended readings: Most readings will be available on Canvas.